When Guns In Police Hands Spontaneously Fire Themselves

William Norman GriggKrystal Barrows, a 35-year-old mother of three, was resting on the couch in her living room in Chillicothe, Ohio when her life was needlessly brought to a violent end by a police officer during a narcotics raid. Barrows was not a suspect.

Ross County Prosecutor Matt Schmidt insists that none of the police deliberately fired his gun into the home. While not ruling out what he called "user error," Schmidt suggested that a "malfunction" might have been responsible for the errant gunshot.

Using the familiar passive voice construction favored by government-aligned publications when describing state-sanctioned criminal violence, the Chillicothe Gazette reported that the round was fired "from the weapon of a law enforcement officer," a conveniently ambiguous preposition intended to disguise or diminish the fact that unless the gun suddenly became self-aware, it was fired by a police officer.

The gun in question was an AR-15 rifle of the kind that in the “wrong” hands (that is, those not consecrated to the task of committing state-sanctioned violence) are usually described as “assault weapons.” The official story is that the rifle, which was locked into a weapons mount on a police motorcycle, was left unattended and attracted the interest of a curious student. One of the students recalled that while the officers were handing out anti-drug propaganda (my word, not his) “the kid got hold of the gun and he shot it at the ground….”

If the gun had been a privately owned weapon, its owner would have been arrested for child endangerment. But this act of potentially lethal irresponsibility was committed by sanctified agents of official coercion, so criminal charges won’t be filed.

A school “resource officer” in San Antonio was placed on paid vacation last May when his gun somehow fired itself inside a local middle school. One local news account explained that “the officer was inside his office at Jordan Middle School when the gun accidentally fired around 8:45 a.m.”; no explanation for the gun’s aberrant behavior was offered.

Six people were charged during the raid; two others were detained and questioned before being released. A total of 11 people, including a juvenile female, were inside the mobile home when the U.S. 23 Task Force arrived to serve the warrant.

According to a sheriff’s office news release, task force officers found “large amounts of heroin,” multiple guns, including pistols and assault rifles, a large sum of cash, drug abuse instruments and numerous items that task force officials say were likely stolen goods. No details on the seized items were given in the release.

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